Bitcoin Blog a1

Sunday, January 10, 2016

The Return of the Bitcoin

I recently got a new desktop computer. With windows 10 now out, I thought I would upgrade my laptop to windows 10. But before this, I wanted to ensure that I could use my wallet backups correctly. I previously had encrypted my wallets in a 7 zip file, and had that 7 zip file saved to a few locations, a portable hard drive, a thumb drive, a Google drive, etc. I thought this would be a flawless system, as I used a strong password and the encryption should keep out any predators. The only issue that came was, I forgot the wallet encryption password. Oh dear.

I saved some of the wallets, I still had in still in use, but I was missing some.

In fact, enough time passed that I managed to forget the password to this set as well, despite my password hint.

At this point I decided to try my first brute force attack. I downloaded a program to crack my password. I soon realized that this method would take, more or less, forever. The program does very specific things very well. For example, if you lost a 3 digit all numbers pin, it would be ok for that. Fortunately, I realized I saved my password in my password vault. So after much worrying and quite a bit of effort, the great crisis was averted.